


The Sexual History of Leslie F***ing Knope

by kyrieanne



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-30
Updated: 2011-11-30
Packaged: 2018-03-20 06:46:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3640656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyrieanne/pseuds/kyrieanne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The title says it all: the sexual history of Leslie K***ing Knope. A character study.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sexual History of Leslie F***ing Knope

Marlene Griggs-Knope did right by her daughter and taught her that sex was about empowerment. Sex was about realizing and expressing yourself. She also taught Leslie that sex is also about gender. A powerful woman excites some men and terrifies others. Stick with the first kind and stay away from the second because you’ll never be who they want. It’s bad for everyone involved.  
  
Marlene outfitted her daughter with the plunder of her own generation’s sexual revolution: birth control, condoms, and mace. She lectured her through all the lies men can tell you ( _No, blue balls is not as painful as giving birth_ ) and sent her off to college a well-equipped virgin.  
  
What Marlene didn’t tell Leslie is that if sex is about gender then gender is about politics and not the kind you practice in the Model UN. This politic has nothing to do with democracy. It is controlled by a few people and there are standards, expectations, that appear to Leslie to be set on a whim because they make no logical sense. Who is to say that Angela Lansbury is not a beauty role model?  
  
This politic apparently was learned on the playground and in middle school locker rooms because Leslie missed it. She missed what was cool and what was sexy. She read too many books and missed the makeup practice sessions during sleepovers. She didn’t own tight clothes because…well she had a mother who said  _no_  and meant it. She wasn’t tan because she spent her summers interning at City Hall.  
  
And at college cool and sexy was sex. It was drinking and parties and careless freedom. And Leslie did figure it out - stumbled into it, really. She was smart and determined. If sex was so great ( _and Leslie thought it might be. She’d made out with enough guys at Model UN competitions to know the thrilling edge that steals your breath._ ) then all she needed to do was play the game. So she shadowed the sexiest girl she knew, Lindsay Carlyle-Shay, and mimicked her. Grew out her hair, piled on the blue eye shadow, and went out on Thursday nights even though she had class the next morning.  
  
“You just need to loose a few pounds, Leslie,” Lindsay said, “its all that breakfast food you eat. Cut out the waffles and you’ll fit into my clothes in no time.”  
  
Yeah, that didn’t happen. Leslie wasn’t interested in selling her soul.  
  
It took a while, but Leslie did have sex. It was with the skinniest boy in the frat that Lindsay’s boyfriend belonged too. He was a sweet guy, but he was still a frat boy and no one told Leslie that drunk frat boys make terrible first times. They are sloppy, come too quickly, and pass out on your arm.  
  
And Leslie figures out that sex is about empowerment. It’s just not always you who is empowered. When you do that walk from his room to your car the morning after, through the frat house, and those boys who never looked at you before are grinning over their cereal bowls, cat calling up the stairs to their friend who just got laid by that excitable blond chick there is nothing empowering about that.  
  
Leslie gives it the old college try and goes again. Except this time she tries a different approach. She drinks less and requires the boys take her out on a first date before she lets them go up her shirt. She sleeps with some of them and not others. She promises herself she'll never be desperate again because that was her mistake the first time. As much as Leslie loves Lindsay, will stand up for her to anyone, secretly she agrees with everyone. Lindsay is desperate and desperate is not sexy. There is nothing empowering about desperation.  
  
And the sex gets better. She figures out the flirting thing - the science and art of putting yourself out there but not too much. She has an orgasm - she thinks - and on one drunken spring night makes out with a girl for two minutes because some dared her too ( _Leslie doesn’t back down from a dare._ ) Over time the boys get less sophistic and by Leslie’s junior year she thinks she might have found the one.  
  
His name is Jeremy and he is perfect. Well, his ears stick out a little but Leslie doesn’t care. He is smart and kind and he likes her for her. She knows this because they didn’t meet at one of Lindsay’s parties. They met in her Industrial Democracies class. He asks to borrow a pen on the first day and by midterms they are dating.  
  
Leslie takes him home for Thanksgiving and at night Marlene comes up to her room, sits down on the corner of Leslie’s twin bed, and folds her hands in her lap, “Jeremy seems nice.”  
  
Leslie puts aside her Eleanor Roosevelt biography, “I think I love him, Mom,” she sighs, “I think he might be it.”  
  
Marlene sits up straighter, “Oh.”  
  
It's the sound of the  _oh_  that slices Leslie. She knows that sound and the words underneath it. Marlene does not approve.  
  
“Jeremy seems perfectly fine,” Marlene pats her daughter’s knee,  “Don’t you think you’re a bit young for love though? I mean- what about your career?”  
  
In the end it doesn’t matter because Jeremy cheats on her with Lindsay. It’s partially Leslie’s fault. She introduced him to Lindsay and that world. Eager to show off her sweet, slightly nerdy boyfriend she dragged him to parties, challenged him to keg stands, and encouraged him to be do what she's done:  borrow from other people the things that everyone else calls cool.  
  
Lindsay, of course, blames the alcohol and Leslie forgives her because she seriously had been beyond wasted that night. Leslie knew because she’d been the designated driver.   
  
Jeremy is a mess - a crying, trembling mess who begs Leslie for forgiveness. H tells her for the first time he loves her and doesn’t want to lose her. And she almost does forgive him. She sits on her couch and listens, holds herself very still, and realizes that it has happened. Sex has empowered her. Before her is this weeping man and his fate is in her hands. But it isn’t the type of empowerment she imagined. It feels stolen.  
  
So Leslie graduates and moves home, not because of the break-up, but because she loves Pawnee. There had been plans for broader horizons - Chicago or maybe even D.C. - but those had been her plans with Jeremy and when she stops long enough to listen to her heart it already belongs to Pawnee.  
  
Lindsay comes with her to Pawnee and there is a period where things are good. Lindsay has sobered up. She’s traded sex for fairy tales. She doesn’t just want _a guy_  but  _the gu_ y now and she drags Leslie with her. Leslie, who has never doodled a boy’s last name next to her own ( _she was too busy writing Madam President Leslie Knope into margins)_ , suddenly starts talking about timelines. How long she will focus on her career, when she will get married, and how many children she will have. At twenty-five she starts counting down because she IS GOING TO RUN OUT OF TIME.  
  
This leads to a terrific string of bad dates. Mostly guys Lindsay meets and casts aside. She tells herself she fell in love with some of them because how else is she going to find THE ONE? If she doesn’t find THE ONE then she and Lindsay won’t be able to have a joint bridal shower and raise their babies together. She needs to settle down before she runs for City Council or becomes mayor because politiking is hard work and you can’t do both at the same time.  
  
And in there she has sex. Some of it is good sex. She definitely orgasms with more than a few of them. But she doesn’t feel empowered. There is something missing with these partners and Leslie isn’t sure what it is.  
  
Everything changes when she gets the job in the Parks department and meets Ron Swanson. There is nothing sexual between them. She doesn’t do mustaches and Ron doesn’t do blondes. No, it isn’t sex. It's Lindsay. Ron does not like Lindsay. He thinks she is flighty and for a while he thinks Leslie is too.  
  
This bothers Leslie because this is her job and she wants to be taken seriously at her job more than anything else. So she sets to earning Ron’s respect the same way she went about having sex or finding THE ONE: with sheer determination and cockeyed optimism that she would win the day.  
  
And it works. Except it destroys her friendship with Lindsay. See the more respect she earns from Ron the more she comes to see the world like him ( _not in terms of government. They will never agree on that._ ) but when it comes to Lindsay she finally gets what so many people have seen for a long time ago. Lindsay isn’t desperate out of some emotional sob story; she's selfish. Really by the time they get to the Eagleton debacle Leslie is already half-way over it.  
  
Except she isn’t really. She misses her best friend. Ron is her friend, but he’s not best friend material. There is something about having someone who will always be there, who knows you, and wants you to succeed.  
  
This is how she ends up sleeping with Mark.  
  
After they come, fall into a pile of limbs on her bed, Leslie tucks her head into the curve of his neck and decides this is what empowerment is. It's what has been missing on all those horrible first dates. It isn’t personal. But this thing with Mark - it has to be personal. He knows her. They talked sometimes in the halls, ate lunch together in the courtyard, and collaborated together on some projects. And that night in the bar he sought her out. He walked past a half dozen other women, slid up to the bar, and said, “Heeeey,” to her.  
  
Empowerment is personal, she decides. It's being known in sex. That is love.  
  
The problem is love can also be unrequited. Mark does not feel the same way. But Leslie can’t shake that feeling she had that night. The way her heart had pounded in her ears. It has to mean something.  
  
She spends her early thirties trying to figure it out. She tries to replicate it with other men. She makes them look her in the eye, call out her name, and she lets them teach her all sorts of adventurous things in the hopes that there will be a connection. But it doesn’t happen. None of them are Mark.  
  
Leslie isn't stupid. She realizes she’s holding onto something that probably only existed for her. But it's all she has.   
  
Something else happens to Leslie in her early thirties. Maybe it's because she is no longer in Lindsay’s shadow or maybe she just finally is ready, but Leslie begins to grow up. It’s not that she matures or becomes responsible. She’s always been those things.  
  
She finally accepts her own shadow. She realizes that she really likes who she is. This may not be revolutionary, but Leslie is perceptive enough that a large percentage of the female population does not like herself. Or at least there's a list in the back of every woman’s mind of things she would change is she could. Leslie isn’t sure when she created her list, but she is pretty sure it began sometime when her mother first started talking to her about sex. It was then that she first became aware of gender, of the threat her womanhood poses not only to men but to herself. It could strangle her and choke her if Leslie didn’t take control of it. She NEEDED to be empowered.  
  
But Leslie abolishes that list thing by thing. She decides a healthy appetite is attractive and stops dieting. She receives too much satisfaction from accomplishing things to apologize for her enthusiasm or drive. She chooses to believe that people yelling at her are people caring loudly, that friendship is the most important thing in the world, and that Pawnee is the greatest town in America, probably the world. She goes about loving herself the same way she goes about everything and it works. She knows she isn’t perfect, but dammit she likes who she is.  
  
And this in and of itself is enough to crown her with a tiara, put on a parade, and pronounce it Leslie Knope day, but it isn’t enough.  
  
She still misses her best friend…or the idea of a best friend. What she really misses is company. Companionship. Community. It is one thing to love yourself, but it only gets you so far.  
  
This is why she hangs onto Mark like she does because he represents hope. Hope of something personal not only in sex but in life. Leslie begins to think that maybe it isn’t enough to be a empowered woman. Maybe there is more to sex and gender and life than that.  
  
This is around the time she meets Ann Perkins.


End file.
